Judith Mossman ends the last chapter of Wild Justice, her fine new book on the Hecuba, with these words:

[Euripides] offers us no easy answers; indeed he creates a world where easy answers are a thing of the past; and the state of flux he represents is reflected in the structure and expression of the play. (203)

This is said about the Hecuba, a play of notorious compositional duality. Medea is a play of nearly perfect construction but also of egregious irrationalities both at its center and at its end. Mossman argues persuasively that Hecuba is not to be taken as morally depraved even in her revenge that includes infanticide and mutilation of another human being, although critics have almost universally found her vengeance so excessive as to be the cause of her metamorphosis into a dog. Turning to the earlier play, we may ask how exactly is Medea's elevation to the theologeion (we might even call it her apotheosis) the result of her horrifying crimes?

In trying to approach this question from various perspectives more questions arise. Primarily these questions concern Medea's status.

Yes, she is a woman. But she is also compared to wild animals (and even inanimate objects) on the one hand, and on the other she is elevated to the place of the gods at the end. Does this divine station affect our reaction to her revenge?

In her relationships she fails at all human family ties, as wife, sister, daughter, and mother. She is stripped of her mortal fi/loi to such a degree that her only fi/loi are strangers. As that happened she is able to count more and more on her divine fi/loi and on herself. She uses her friendlessness to her advantage (like everything else). Does she strip away her mortality with her murders?

Her house is central to the stage action. As a woman she is confined to the oi)=koj and its environs. And yet she is the diplomat, negotiating with men who represent one or another po/lij. Ultimately she sets the terms in every relationship whether with men or women. Her house has displaced the civic center of Corinth.

The first words are spoken by an elderly slave woman who is joined in the prologue by an aged male fellow slave. The only other Euripidean play to open with an anonymous character is the Electra (another play about displacement). Why does Euripides open his play with two old slaves? Does their condition of servitude cast any light on Medea's status as she is rendered powerless, homeless, socially placeless by Jason's defection (and her own past)?

These are some of the interconnected questions about the disturbing conjunction of Medea's simultaneous alterity and familiarity that will be examined in the presentation.

As Aristophanes says truly of Euripidean tragedy, "The wife had her say, and the young girl, and the old granny (Frogs, 949-50). Euripides as educator gives voice to those usually silenced. What is he saying through these voices to Athens, so prominent at the center of the play as the home of Wisdom, Harmony, the Muses, and Love?